Surfacing (6 page)

The trail dips down and across a swamp inlet at the tip of a bay, cedars here and bullrushes, blueflags, ooze. I go slowly, looking for footprints. There’s nothing but a deer track, no sign of anyone: apparently Paul and the searchers didn’t make it this far. The mosquitoes have scented us and swarm around our heads; Joe swears gently, David loudly, at the end of the line I hear Anna slapping.

We swing away from the shore and here it’s a jungle, branches growing in across the path, hazel and moose maple, pithy junk trees. Sight is blocked two feet in, trunks and leaves a solid interlocking fence, green, green-grey, greybrown. None of the branches is chopped or broken back, if he’s been here he’s gone miraculously around and between them rather than through. I stand aside and David hacks at the wall with his machete, not very well; he tatters and bends rather than slicing.

We come up against a tree fallen across the trail. It’s brought several young balsams down with it: they lie tangled together, logjam. “I don’t think anyone’s been through here,” I say, and Joe says “Right on,” he’s annoyed: it’s obvious. I peer into the forest to see if another trail has been cut around the windfall but there’s no sign; or there are too many signs, since I’m anxious every opening between two trees looks like a path.

David prods at the dead trunk with the machete, poking holes in the bark. Joe sits down on the ground: he’s breathing hard, too much city, and the flies are getting to him, he scratches his neck and the backs of his hands. “I guess that’s it,” I say because I have to be the one to confess defeat, and Anna says “Thank god, they’re eating me alive.”

We start back. He could still be in there somewhere but I see now the impossibility of searching the island for him, it’s two miles long. It would take twenty or thirty men at least, strung out at intervals and walking straight through the forest, and even then they could miss him, dead or alive, accident or suicide or murder. Or if for some unfathomable reason he’s chosen this absence and is hiding, they’d never find him: there would be nothing easier in this country than to let the searchers get ahead of you and then follow at a distance, stopping when they stop, keeping them in sight so that no matter which way they turned you would always be behind them. That’s what I would do.

We walk through the green light, feet muffled on wet decaying leaves. The trail is altered going back: I’m at the end now. Every few steps I glance to each side, eyes straining, scanning the ground for evidence, for anything human: a button, a cartridge, a discarded bit of paper.

It’s like the times he used to play hide and seek with us in the semi-dark after supper, it was different from playing in a house, the space to hide in was endless; even when we knew which tree he had gone behind there was the fear that what would come out when you called would be someone else.

CHAPTER SIX

No one can expect anything else from me. I checked everything, I tried; now I’m absolved from knowing. I should be telling someone official, filling in forms, getting help as you’re supposed to in an emergency. But it’s like searching for a ring lost on a beach or in the snow: futile. There’s no act I can perform except waiting; tomorrow Evans will ship us to the village, and after that we’ll travel to the city and the present tense. I’ve finished what I came for and I don’t want to stay here, I want to go back to where there is electricity and distraction. I’m used to it now, filling the time without it is an effort.

The others are trying to amuse themselves. Joe and David are out in one of the canoes; I should have made them take life-jackets, neither of them can steer, they’re shifting their paddles from side to side. I can see them from the front window and from the side window I can see Anna, partly hidden by trees. She’s lying on her belly in bikini and sunglasses, reading a murder mystery, though she must be cold: the sky has cleared a little, but when the clouds move in front of the sun the heat shuts off.

Except for the bikini and the colour of her hair she could be me at sixteen, sulking on the dock, resentful at being away from the city and the boyfriend I’d proved my normality by obtaining; I wore his ring, too big for any of my fingers, around my neck on a chain, like a crucifix or a military decoration. Joe and David, when distance has disguised their faces and their awkwardness, might be my brother and my father. The only place left for me is that of my mother; a problem, what she did in the afternoons between the routines of lunch and supper. Sometimes she would take breadcrumbs or seeds out to the bird feeder tray and wait for the jays, standing quiet as a tree, or she would pull weeds in the garden; but on some days she would simply vanish, walk off by herself into the forest. Impossible to be like my mother, it would need a time warp; she was either ten thousand years behind the rest or fifty years ahead of them.

I brush my hair in front of the mirror, delaying; then I turn back to my work, my deadline, the career I suddenly found myself having, I didn’t intend to but I had to find something I could sell. I’m still awkward with it, I don’t know what clothes to wear to interviews: it feels strapped to me, like an aqualung or an extra, artificial limb. I have a title though, a classification, and that helps: I’m what they call a commercial artist, or, when the job is more pretentious, an illustrator. I do posters, covers, a little advertising and magazine work and the occasional commissioned book like this one. For a while I was going to be a real artist; he thought that was cute but misguided, he said I should study something I’d be able to use because there have never been any important woman artists. That was before we were married and I still listened to what he said, so I went into Design and did fabric patterns. But he was right, there never have been any.

This is the fifth book I’ve done; the first was a Department of Manpower employment manual, young people with lobotomized grins, rapturous in their padded slots: Computer Programmer, Welder, Executive Secretary, Lab Technician. Line drawings and a few graphs. The others were children’s books and so is this one,
Quebec Folk Tales
, it’s a translation. It isn’t my territory but I need the money. I’ve had the typescript three weeks, I haven’t come up with any final illustrations yet. As a rule I work faster than that.

The stories aren’t what I expected; they’re like German fairy tales, except for the absence of red-hot iron slippers and nail-studded casks. I wonder if this mercy descends from the original tellers, from the translator or from the publisher; probably it’s Mr. Percival the publisher, he’s a cautious man, he shies away from anything he calls “disturbing.” We had an argument about that: he said one of my drawings was too frightening and I said children liked being frightened. “It isn’t the children who buy the books,” he said, “it’s their parents.” So I compromised; now I compromise before I take the work in, it saves time. I’ve learned the sort of thing he wants: elegant and stylized, decoratively coloured, like patisserie cakes. I can do that, I can imitate anything: fake Walt Disney, Victorian etchings in sepia, Bavarian cookies, ersatz Eskimo for the home market. Though what they like best is something they hope will interest the English and American publishers too.

Clean water in a glass, brushes in another glass, watercolours and acrylics in their metal toothpaste tubes. Bluebottle fly near my elbow, metallic abdomen gleaming, sucker tongue walking on the oilcloth like a seventh foot. When it was raining we would sit at this table and draw in our scrapbooks with crayons or coloured pencils, anything we liked. In school you had to do what the rest were doing.

On the crest of the hill for all to see
God planted a Scarlet Maple Tree

printed thirty-five times, strung out along the top of the blackboard, each page with a preserved maple leaf glued to it, ironed between sheets of wax paper.

I outline a princess, an ordinary one, emaciated fashion-model torso and infantile face, like those I did for
Favourite Fairy Tales.
Earlier they annoyed me, the stories never revealed the essential things about them, such as what they ate or whether their towers and dungeons had bathrooms, it was as though their bodies were pure air. It wasn’t Peter Pan’s ability to fly that made him incredible for me, it was the lack of an outhouse near his underground burrow.

My princess tilts her head: she’s gazing up at a bird rising from a nest of flames, wings outspread like a heraldic emblem or a fire insurance trademark: The Tale of the Golden Phoenix. The bird has to be yellow and the fire can only be yellow too, they have to keep the cost down so I can’t use red; that way I lose orange and purple also. I asked for red instead of yellow but Mr. Percival wanted “a cool tone.”

I pause to judge: the princess looks stupefied rather than filled with wonder. I discard her and try again, but this time she’s cross-eyed and has one breast bigger than the other. My fingers are stiff, maybe I’m getting arthritis.

I skim the story again for a different episode, but no pictures form. It’s hard to believe that anyone here, even the grandmothers, ever knew these stories: this isn’t a country of princesses, The Fountain of Youth and The Castle of the Seven Splendours don’t belong here. They must have told stories about something as they sat around the kitchen range at night: bewitched dogs and malevolent trees perhaps, and the magic powers of rival political candidates, whose effigies in straw they burned during elections.

But the truth is that I don’t know what the villagers thought or talked about, I was so shut off from them. The older ones occasionally crossed themselves when we passed, possibly because my mother was wearing slacks, but even that was never explained. Although we played during visits with the solemn, slightly hostile children of Paul and Madame, the games were brief and wordless. We never could find out what went on inside the tiny hillside church they filed into on Sundays: our parents wouldn’t let us sneak up and peer through the windows, which made it illicit and attractive. After my brother began going to school in the winters he told me it was called the Mass and what they did inside was eat; I imagined it as a sort of birthday party, with ice cream – birthday parties were my only experience then of people eating in groups – but according to my brother all they had was soda crackers.

When I started school myself I begged to be allowed to go to Sunday School, like everyone else; I wanted to find out, also I wanted to be less conspicuous. My father didn’t approve, he reacted as though I’d asked to go to a pool hall: Christianity was something he’d escaped from, he wished to protect us from its distortions. But after a couple of years he decided I was old enough, I could see for myself, reason would defend me.

I knew what you wore, itchy white stockings and a hat and gloves; I went with one of the girls from school whose family took a pursed-mouth missionary interest in me. It was a United Church, it stood on a long grey street of block-shaped buildings. On the steeple instead of a cross there was a thing like an onion going around which they said was a ventilator, and inside it smelled of face powder and damp wool trousers. The Sunday School part was in the cellar; it had blackboards like a regular school, with K
I
CKAPOO
JOY JUICE
printed on one of them in orange chalk and underneath, in green chalk, the mysterious initials C.G.
I.
T. This was a possible clue, until they translated it for me, Canadian Girls In Training. The teacher wore maroon nail-polish and a blue pancake-sized hat clipped to her head by two prongs; she told us a lot about her admirers and their cars. At the end she handed out pictures of Jesus, who didn’t have thorns and ribs but was alive and draped in a bed sheet, tired-looking, surely incapable of miracles.

After church every time, the family I went with drove to a hill above the railway terminal to watch the trains shunting back and forth; it was their Sunday treat. Then they would have me to lunch, which was always the same thing, pork and beans and canned pineapple for dessert. At the beginning the father would say Grace, “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen,” while the four children pinched and kicked each other under the table; and at the end he would say,

Pork and beans the musical fruit,
The more you eat the more you toot.

The mother, who had a bun of greying hair and prickles around her mouth like a schmoo, would frown and ask me what I’d learned about Jesus that morning, and the father would grin feebly, ignored by all; he was a clerk in a bank, the Sunday trains his only diversion, the little rhyme his only impropriety. For some time I had a confused notion that canned pineapple really was musical and would make you sing better, until my brother set me straight.

“Maybe I’ll be a Catholic,” I said to my brother; I was afraid to say it to my parents.

“Catholics are crazy,” he said. The Catholics went to a school down the street from ours and the boys threw snowballs at them in winter and rocks in spring and fall. “They believe in the
B.V.M.
”

I didn’t know what that was and neither did he, so he said “They believe if you don’t go to Mass you’ll turn into a wolf.”

“Will you?” I said.

“We don’t go,” he said, “and we haven’t.”

Maybe that’s why they didn’t waste any sweat searching for my father, they were afraid to, they thought he’d turned into a wolf; he’d be a prime candidate since he never went to Mass at all.
Les maudits anglais
, the damned English, they mean it; they’re sure we’re all damned literally. There should be a
loup-garou
story in
Quebec Folk Tales
, perhaps there was and Mr. Percival took it out, it was too rough for him. But in some of the stories they do it the other way round, the animals are human inside and they take their fur skins off as easily as getting undressed.

I remember the hair on Joe’s back, vestigial, like appendices and little toes: soon we’ll evolve into total baldness. I like the hair though, and the heavy teeth, thick shoulders, unexpectedly slight hips, hands whose texture I can still feel on my skin, roughened and leathery from the clay. Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous. I don’t care much for his temperament, which alternates between surliness and gloom, or for the overgrown pots he throws so skilfully on the wheel and then mutilates, cutting holes in them, strangling them, slashing them open. That’s unfair, he never uses a knife, only his fingers, and a lot of the time he only bends them, doubles them over; even so they have a disagreeable mutant quality. Nobody else admires them either: the aspiring housewives he teaches two evenings a week, Pottery and Ceramics 432-
A
, want to make ashtrays and plates with cheerful daisies on them instead, and the things don’t sell at all in the few handicraft shops that will even stock them. So they accumulate in our already cluttered basement apartment like fragmentary memories or murder victims. I can’t even put flowers in them, the water would run out through the rips. Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.

I wanted my third princess to be running lightly through a meadow but the paper’s too wet, she gets out of control, sprouting an enormous rear; I try to salvage it by turning it into a bustle, but it’s not convincing. I give up and doodle, adding fangs and a moustache, surrounding her with moons and fish and a wolf with bristling hackles and a snarl; but that doesn’t work either, it’s more like an overweight collie. What’s the alternative to princesses, what else will parents buy for their children? Humanoid bears and talking pigs, Protestant choo-choo trains who make the grade and become successful.

Perhaps it’s not only his body I like, perhaps it’s his failure; that also has a kind of purity.

I crumple up my third princess, dump the paint water into the slop pail and clean the brushes. I survey from the windows: David and Joe are still out on the lake but they seem to be heading back now. Anna is halfway up the hillside stairs, towel over her arm. I see her for a moment faceted by the screen door and then she’s inside.

“Hi,” she says, “get anything done?”

“Not much,” I say.

She comes over to the table and smooths out my botched princesses. “That’s good,” she says without conviction.

“Those are mistakes,” I say.

“Oh.” She turns the sheets over, face down. “Did you believe that stuff when you were little?” she says. “I did, I thought I was really a princess and I’d end up living in a castle. They shouldn’t let kids have stuff like that.” She goes to the mirror, blots and smooths her face, then stands on tiptoe, checking her back to see if it’s pink. “What was he
doing
up here?” she asks suddenly.